Spoon River Anthology: Lucinda Matlock

Edgar Lee Masters is not overlooked, and his Spoon River is well known, but not well enough. It would be hard for it to have its due, since it is, for my taste anyway, one of the crowning achievements of American literature.

Masters lets his 200 plus characters speak their minds without authorial censorship. They are grave, gay, kind, angry, cynical, full of love, full of hatred, spewing venom and offering forgiveness. Masters never tries to arbitrate. He simply lets them tell their stories from the grave, but he does juxtapose. Tom Merritt tells of being killed by his wife’s lover, then his wife tells her story, then the killer tells his. Three stories on three pages, but with viewpoints so different they could be in different universes.

Choosing a poem to illustrate Spoon River could become an exercise in choosing what I believe, thus skewing the picture. Spoon River is huge in variety. Like the Bible, you can find arguments somewhere in it to bolster any position.

Instead, I’ll give you what seems to be Masters’ favorite, the story of his grandmother, given under another name.

Lucinda Matlock
from The Spoon River Anthology
Edgar Lee Masters – 1915

I went to the dances at Chandlerville,
And played snap-out at Winchester.
One time we changed partners,
Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,
And then I found Davis.
We were married and lived together for seventy years,
Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,
Eight of whom we lost
Ere I had reached the age of sixty.
I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,
I made the garden, and for holiday
Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,
And many a flower and medicinal weed —
Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,
And passed to a sweet repose.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you —
It takes life to love Life.

Hiatus, sort of ends today. The fantasy short story Prince of Exile will begin here Monday.